A strange news item caught my eye on the front page of CNBC.com this morning – about a blogger who allegedly has a ‘leak’ of the results of the US Bank Stress test – the results of which are supposed to be released on May 4.
The name of the blogger sounded vaguely familiar. I read my share of conspiracy theory forums and sure enough, the guy’s known for being a serious white-supremacist nutjob.
Just a little further digging reveals he’s been behind several hoaxes lately:
One was about a bank run in October that, conveniently
“echoes rhetoric being used by the White House and the Federal Reserve in order to ram through the widely despised bailout bill, by using economic terrorism and the fear of total collapse of the financial system to get the message across, just as Bush, Bernanke and Paulson have been ferociously doing for the past two weeks.”
http://www.congresscheck.com/2008/10/03/hoax-bank-closure-story-peddles-bailout-propaganda/
He also claimed that the US was dumping the dollar in favour of an ‘Amero’ coin – for ‘proof’ he used a photo that was actually lifted from a website marketing novelty coins.
Even worse, this alleged leak was actually plagiarism:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS180066+06-Apr-2009+BW20090406 from a ‘study’ issued last week by a Dr. Martin Weiss. While I make no claim either way as to his reputation, this really should be treated in the media as the ‘source’, and NOT the nutty blog that lifted it, claiming to be an ‘inside leak’.
It took me all of ten minutes doing a couple of searches in Google to conclude that this blog post was basically a steaming pile of crap.
That’s not to say that banks are all solvent and the picture is as rosy as this latest round of earnings tried to report, or that there aren’t some serious structural problems that remain. At the same time, as one person (not me) commented on Zero Hedge,
If a scumbag like this has the ability to get insider information about the stress tests, I would much rather our economic system crash and burn to the ground.
Ironically, there is one more interesting item about this Hal Turner:
according to some sites, he works for the FBI.
Regardless of what one might think of the genuine state of the US Financial System, this particular post does NOT merit front page MSM attention.
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